


That process where something is drawn or laid over as a cover

by faceofstone



Category: Obduction (Video Game)
Genre: Bad At History & Cheating At History, Diary/Journal, Gen, Obduction (geology), Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28170360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: Usually that's when the edge of a tectonic plate consisting of oceanic crust is thrust over the edge of an adjacent plate consisting of continental crust, but really, it happens all over.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	That process where something is drawn or laid over as a cover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/gifts).



> The happiest of Yuletides to a requester with a most excellent taste! There's so much uncharted territory with this canon, I hope this works for you <3

12193 AH

Lőrinc Tòth gets me. Or, rather: no he doesn’t. He doesn’t get the point. At all. But, here is the key, neither do I. So we can miss our points together, footsteps following in stupid footsteps. It’s comforting, like we’re all in this together. Which, well, we are.

Things have changed in this past week. I do not know how to explain the depth of understanding that comes with the visions the Arai polyarchs have shown to me. I cannot talk about this (at least not yet) to our fair town’s xenoentomology enthusiasts, bless their hearts, that bustling group whose biggest interest in the Arai is figuring out how their barnacles do that coordinated little flash of light… it’s a fun party trick worth exploring, but now that the polyarchs have spoken… looking at barnacles and beetles do their thing is not what _this_ is about. For values of _this_ that may or may not be integer, or for that matter rational.

So I go back to find comfort in Tòth’s writings, and in complaining about them in this journal. If one thing can be said for certain, it is that the good Doctor held a great love for the purple cliffs and for the depth of the winds that, in his words, “blow from nowhere and through the membrane roll back whence they came”. The man spent his life studying this place, eventually shunning Hunrath society to become a hermit of the rocks, taking up residence in one of Kaptar’s remote shrines. Sure, he still came back for elections and holiday dinners, but it’s the principle that matters.

(I remain confined to the surface of his thoughts. All of his journals are cataloged and accessible to the public, but only three of them – the ones he meant for our future consumption, as I am here, in his future, reading them over and over – are written in the rough English he learned after he came here. Holding out hope that one day the Hungarian language will return to Hunrath, for now, that’s all I’ve got. Surface: it’s a theme. Surface, repetitions, strata. The same tree growing four times.)

Back to my man Lőrinc: to confront the breadth of his thoughts is a humbling endeavor. He was a scientist, alright. A mind as organized as the groovings of the Kaptar temples that spirited him away. Read his writings and you get a real feeling of a cold, carved, dark gray slab of stone, which is pretty impressive regardless of whether that silly campfire tale is true or not. You know, that at the end of his life, he sat near a border in Maray staring at Kaptar’s horizon until he vanished and became one with the plateau outside. Well, I don’t know how to tell it. Tham manages not to make it sound stupid.

So you get this smart guy right in his element, but: he lacks perspective. First among us to walk on this new soil and he looks at it as… a human. He thinks he is looking at History but all he sees is a Polaroid.

The stairs!, he says. Admire the might of the industry of the People of the Whales, lose yourself in the stern stone patterns that form the grammar and lexicon of the temples. All here speaks of greatness. We picture a population of giants. But the stairs – the stairs are human. They were like us, he says, pointing at the stone steps, which are indeed just as wide and as tall as those we make in Hunrath for human legs, and in Soria for their kind.

He pictures these people in a mythical faraway past that has been reduced to a single point of convergence. The gears and hooks burst into the temples and they are all active at once, all populated at once. The disciples welcome the flashes of brass among their sacred halls, meat processing and prayer joined in an exalted communion, and on the edges of this world’s stage, the Arai droned away in their incessant, aimless, insignificant buzzing. And herein lies the tragedy, he says: that we were brought together, human, mofang, villein, and a gaping emptiness where the People of the Whales should have been.

These cliffs, filled with an absence that took his breath away, he called “The Hive”, for the humble ones who were left. It was meant as an accusation, almost. The mourning never left him.

For their part, the Villein confirm that their tree-neighbors were always the buzzing swarm: no other living animal was ever spotted in Kaptar since the ambassador seeds connected them.

But if you look at other worlds and only want to see yourself reflected all over…

It is so easy for me, standing here now, to wag my finger at him (well, at his journals) and say he got it so wrong that… I don’t know. That it went full circle and became wrong again. I have Kaptar’s millennia in my head, or at least I had them last week, now it’s just a fading echo. I saw the temple people rise and fall like the Arai saw them rise and fall, the industry people rise and fall, the wind people and the canyon people and more, civilization after civilization until the whole world was on the brink of collapse, with only the Arai left to watch.

But with the same finger-wagging gusto I could look at the mirror and have some choice words with the gal on the other side. The Hunrath I see in there behind me is just as flat as Lőrinc Tòth’s Kaptar. What is Earth? “1960s Singapore”, “Aínsa 2034”, “somewhere in the woods in Vermont, honestly I lost count” are just names and dates. The people who arrive here from there carry them within themselves and reflect them but all I see is that flat surface of the consequences of their history on their here and now. Hunrath as it lives and breathes today is made of so many unseen broken connections and if someone could… like the Arai can for their people, like the Villein can for their people… see all the appendages behind us, this vision of Hunrath would suddenly come together like those magic picture books, the ones where you strain your eyes to see the hidden third dimension.

Is this about telling stories? Maybe we should. Do that, I mean. Tell our stories.

I don't know. It’s not urgent. There’s a list of priorities in this place and this is not one of them. It’s really not. It’s okay to live in the present and dabble in our small cross sections of layers and repetitions – Lőrinc Tòth following in the footsteps of not one but three civilizations, I following in his, future me reading this, we’re making some real history here.

But there is a sense that eludes us in all this relocating and overlapping, laying over and over, collector seeds bursting in the canyon taking away a bit of Earth to give us one new sight. If someone had a head big enough to contain the thought of all the four spheres, each of them carrying its infinite details, and an imagination big enough to make the ponderous effort to bring them together and superimpose them as one, I wonder what image would it be that would result from that, what depths, what meaning...


End file.
